Request for Critique on New Site

Looks good to me!

[sig moderated]

Love the colors, hate the row of “buttons” (yahoo, et al) in the sidebar. All seems to work fine. For some reason I get a flash of bright green background when loading first time or after clearing cache, in the top nav area.

Your sidebar links (categories) seem a tag too large and “bold” for your theme design. Otherwise good job.

Houseofboyd — thanks for taking a look =)
Vkaryl — are the buttons a decision between aesthetics and convenience for the visitors, or are the buttons not necessary? We’ve noticed that many blogs utilize them, but we are just getting familiar with subscriptions. We use Bloglines, and manually subscribe to any blogs we’re interested in. At the moment we’ve reduced the number we had and think it looks somewhat better, but they still are pretty gaudy. Also, we think we fixed the green flash — it would be great to know if it that issue is resolved on your browser. Thanks again for the input!
KatGirl — We appreciate you taking a look! We’ll putz around with different font sizes and see if something looks better.

Hiya…. yup, the “green flash” is gone, hope it wasn’t something buried deep!

Buttons…. I dunno…. I just have an antipathy to them – and yes, I see them on blogs around but to me they tend to show up on sites which land in my “desperate for….” category – that is, blogs which don’t have a solid raison d’etre (heh – like so many of my own…. but I don’t do buttons….) or a logical focus.

Then again, since I don’t do feeds as such, perhaps my impression is out of whack. When I WANT a feed, I use FF’s nice little inbuilt “feed” icon in the addy bar. It may be a case of a simple “blindness” on my part.

Thanks again vkaryl — glad the green flash is gone, and it’s difficult to know with the buttons. Perhaps a new post is in order to get some opinions from more WordPress community members. See if there’s any sort of a consensus out there.

Love the header.Nice and clean. Seems to fit well with the subject.
Pretty sure I’m not colour blind but the flash when site opens was there but not green. No big deal dot think it will put anyone off your blog.
As to the buttons aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!! Personally I think they ruin the look and feel of your site. Do they achieve any useful purpose?

Robcox — in regards to the buttons, that’s what we’re wondering. With our small knowledge on the subject, it seems like if someone is familiar with feeds and subscriptions, they’ll have their own methods to subscribe. Are the buttons just for people who don’t know how to subscribe? If so, maybe the link we put under ‘subscribe’ (which leads to a page explaining rss feeds/subscription, etc.) is all we need. So there’s the question — do they serve any useful purpose? Do they add convenience for anyone? We’d love to get more opinions on this. At this point we’re thinking we’ll take them down, but it would be interesting to learn more about why people choose to keep them up, just to add to our blog knowledge.
Thanks for the input, Robcox!
Kenton and Rebecca

The idea is that folks who aren’t real hep on RSS will see the button for their RSS Reader (or personalized web page) of choice and be happy.

Personally, I just use the “standard” orange RSS button. If you want to use the “chicklets”, maybe put them on your “subscribe” page as shortcuts for folks bewildered by what they just read. ??

My $.02 worth.

HandySolo — You’ve spurred the idea of creating a dedicated page for subscriptions on our site — that way beginners can have things explained to them, while we avoid having the aesthetic disruption of the chicklets. Thanks for the new name for the buttons, too. We like it. =)
Kenton and Rebecca

On the archive pages it might look neater if, at the top of the page, the link to the home page was on a seperate line from the ‘Previous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links. And I agree that moving the subsciption buttons to a seperate page would preserve the clean look of the site.

Nice,
two thinks about the sidebar: I would choose a smaller font for the items (as mentioned above) and I would use a different background in post and sidebar,

Nice work!

Only thing that’s somehow out is the search field & button just hanging there and lack of separation between sections in the right side menu.

Thanks for the additional critiques and ideas — having a dividing color betwixt post and sidebar is an idea we’ve been toying with. We also ended up moving the buttons to a dedicated subscription page — very happy with that — thanks for spurring the idea! We have to say that we’re very impressed with the helpfulness of the WordPress community. Great feedback. We feel like we’re almost ready to ‘launch’ this site — begin submitting to carnivals, etc. and get it out in the world. Very excited!
Kenton and Rebecca